By PAULA TRACY, InDepthNH.org
WASHINGTON – On the anniversary of the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 which was overturned in 2022 by the “Trump Court” reproductive rights are again under fire in Washington in the first few days of the Trump Presidency, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, said Wednesday.
Instead of focusing on issues that voters at the polls in November said they care about, like reducing the costs of groceries, prescription drugs and housing, the first week of the new administration finds Senators looking at a possible effort to further restrict access to abortion, Shaheen said.
Shaheen was part of a livestream press conference from the Capitol which also included Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), a senior member and former chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Tina Smith (D-MN).
This week, they said Republicans are pushing a vote on Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act legislation that they said would create a new government mandate overriding the best judgment of grieving families facing a fatal fetal diagnosis, threaten providers, and create even more barriers to reproductive health care in America—while at the same time they are putting Medicaid on the chopping block and attacking SNAP, WIC, and many other programs struggling families rely on.
This bill, https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/s6/BILLS-119s6pcs.xml if made law they said would significantly interfere with the doctor-patient relationship and pose unnecessary and harmful obstacles to a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her reproductive health.
The bill is sponsored by Republican Oklahoma Senator James Lankford and has 44 co-sponsors, all Republican. It was introduced on Jan. 15 and on January 21 a motion passed to proceed.
The make-up of the Senate is now 53 Republican Senators, 45 Democrats, and two independents.
In a statement Jan. 16 Lankford said “no child should be denied medical care simply because they are ‘unwanted.’ Today, if an abortion procedure fails and a child is born alive, doctors can just ignore the crying baby on the table and watch them slowly die of neglect. That’s not an abortion, that’s infanticide,” said Lankford.
In 2002, Congress passed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act which codified in law that a newborn, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, is to be legally recognized as a person from the moment of birth if he or she shows any sign of life. The 2002 law did not provide any measures to enforce the protection of these infants, which has allowed the current practice of leaving a child to die after a botched abortion to continue. The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act adds clear expectations of care, hospital transfer requirements, mandatory reporting, private rights of action for moms, and reasonable criminal penalties for health care professionals who violate the law, Lankford’s statement reads.
Sen. Murray said it is already illegal to kill a baby and the bill aims to simply override the judgment of a woman and her doctor.
She said it has been made worse by the U.S. Supreme Court, which she referred to as the “Trump Court” that struck down the landmark Roe decision, which now leaves it up to the states to determine abortion law.
She said instead of working to make life affordable, the bill aims to make a heartbreaking situation worse.
Schumer noted that on the campaign trail, Trump said he would leave abortion to the states rather than making a federal law. He said Trump “lies.”
He said the bill is “just gross” and comes only two days into the new administration.
The Senate minority leader said the only good news from this is that “they are showing their true colors” early and he said the public should expect more extreme measures to be pushed by the Republicans, many of whom know nothing about women’s health care, which would be fought by Democrats.
Shaheen said she remembered what things were like for women before Roe was signed into law following the 7-2 vote in the case.
“This used to be a day to celebrate that decision, the hard won victory of generations of women finally had the right to determine our own future for our bodies but since the Dobbs decision in 2022 this day now shows how far we’ve gone in the wrong direction,” Shaheen said.
Shaheen said she hears from people in New Hampshire and across the country of their fears and concerns.
Shaheen noted there are some Republicans who share her concerns but it is disconcerting that as a body now in control of the Senate, instead of finding ways to work together to lower costs, they want to start with this.
“What this legislation would do is to put women’s lives in danger,” she said. “This is what we are being given by the new administration.”
The senior senator from New Hampshire said there is no one who has been elected to the Senate on a platform of making it hard for people to access healthcare.
“We should be here voting on legislation to make healthcare more affordable, to make women’s access to care better, when women are dying across this country because of the Dobbs decision and yet here we are talking about making it harder for families in the most difficult of times. I hope that our Republican colleagues are going to come to the table and work with us to drop this extreme agenda and to work on what the American people want,” Shaheen said. “That’s what it would mean for the real ‘Golden Age of America'” as Trump referred this time to in his inaugural address.
